BrainVoyager Plugins for macOS

Support for plugins constitutes an important feature of BrainVoyager allowing to extent the software with additional computational routines. These extensions can be created by anyone able to write C++ code without the need for an update of BrainVoyager. When BrainVoyager is installed on your computer, you will find several supported plugins, most of which developed by Brain Innovation. All plugins are accessible through the "Plugins" menu (see figure on the right) after installation. The table below lists the most recent versions of these plugins. Additional plugins not listed below or not distributed with the standard BrainVoyager installation can be found at the Support Web Site.

Consult the "Plugins" topic in the "Additional Documentation" chapter of the User's Guide for further details on how to use plugins. If you have yourself created a plugin and think about sharing it with BrainVoyager users around the world, send an email to "support_at_brainvoyager_dot_com". Note that the plugins provided by Brain Innovation and Maastricht University are automatically installed with BrainVoyager. If you have a recent version of BrainVoyager installed, you usually do not need to download plugins. Multiple users. If you do not find plugins in the "Plugins" menu, it is likely that you are not logged in as the user who installed BrainVoyager since plugins are stored in the "Documents/BVExtensions" folder during installation. In that case we recommend to install the whole "BVExtensions" folder that includes all standard plugins as well as scripts and plugins (see below).Note. Since BrainVoyager 20, plugins can also be developed in Python. Python scripts and plugins are available through the "Python" icon in the main toolbar or via the "Python" menu.

Download and Installation

It is recommended to download the contents of the whole "BVExtensions" folder containing all plugins as well as AppleScript, JavaScript and Python scripts:

Extract the downloaded "BVExtensions_macOS_v21.zip" file in the Documents folder so that the unzipped contents is stored in the user's "Documents/BVExtensions" folder. If the data is extracted at another location, move the "BVExtensions" folder into the "Documents" folder. The "BVExtensions" folder will contain the "AppleScript", "Plugins_64", "Scripts", "PythonScripts" and "PythonPlugins" subfolders.

If you want to (re-)download specific plugins, select the plugin using the respective link in the table below and put it into the "Plugins_64" folder" folder. The "Plugins_64" folder is located within the "BVExtensions" directory, which is itself located within your "Documents" folder. We advise to unzip the files using a Terminal and calling "$ unzip [plugin_zip_file]". If you instead unzip it by double-clicking the zip file in Finder, the automatic zip extraction tool of macOS creates an additional subfolder containing the extracted files in case that the zip file stores multiple files/folders. If you want to avoid the Terminal, double click the zip file in Finder and move the content within the created subfolder into the "Plugins_64" folder.

Getting Help for Plugins

Most plugins contain help files, which are extracted in sub-folders within the "Plugins_64" folder. The available documentation of a plugin can be accessed by clicking a respective link in the plugins overview text, which you get by clicking the "Description Of Plugins" item in the "Plugins" menu (see snapshot above). The help for the ICA plugins can be found in the User's Guide.

Plugins for Mac OS X

Plugin Name

Author

Description

Download

Example Plugin

Rainer GoebelBrain Innovation

Simple plugin inverting intensity values of a VMR. It can be used by developers to get started with plugin development (see section "For Developers" for source code)

Indpendent Component Analysis (ICA) for VTC files. Consult the User's Guide for documentation on how to start the ICA plugin via the "Independent Component Analysis" dialog and how to visualize the obtained independent components using the "Overlay Independent Components" dialog.